How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [87]
When we first moved into the new house, Lilah was still learning new word signs. One of her favorite combinations translated something like this: There is a light; turn it on (hand held overhead, first balled momentarily, fingers suddenly flying open to show you what to do). If you complied, she would even say “thank you” (finger tapping heart).
One spring night, the nine-month-old Lilah and I sat outside wrapped in blankets staring up at the moon, which was nearing full. A rollicking storm had been through for the past few days, revealing to us all of the places where our new house flooded. But the rain had stopped, and between the thick black clouds covering about half the sky we could see the brightest stars and the bright full moon, which had found itself in a large hole in the clouds and was shining down on the still wet and now sparkling nighttime landscape. I told Lilah about night and the moon and the rain. We heard coyotes across the canyon, and I told her about them, too (and about why the kitties were now going to be solely indoor kitties).
And then the moon ducked behind one of the thick clouds, and everything got dark.
Lilah looked around, looked up to where the moon used to be, and looked at me. Then she held her fist up in the air and flung her fingers open. She looked at me expectantly.
The cloud passed. The moon came back out and once again brightened the landscape.
Lilah smiled at me and tapped her heart.
• • •
I have an extremely vivid memory of the day that summer, a few weeks before her first birthday, when Lilah really learned to walk. She had previously taken a few halting steps before tumbling, or she had scooted along while holding a wall, but one day she instantly went from easily manageable (she would not have gone too far if I had looked away for sixty seconds) to fast, unpredictable, and apt to disappear in seconds. A day earlier, while trying to throw a friend in the swimming pool, I had broken my ankle, and I was now in a cast and on crutches. The fact that I had to take a few steps from the kitchen counter to the refrigerator was something I now mourned. But the worst thing was that Lilah was suddenly up and running just as I was slow on my crutches. The only way I could keep up was to crawl. So, that day, Lilah and I traded. She now walked. I now crawled. I had many theories about the precise symbolism of that transition, and all of the theories were ominous.
Lilah made up a sign-language symbol for me walking on crutches (two hands held in front of her, pointer fingers moving up and down), which I count as the moment when she first learned to mock me. I was, perhaps unsurprisingly, enamored of the mocking.
Six days later, still on crutches, I headed to Italy to give a talk at an international conference on the Kuiper belt. We talked about the formation of the Kuiper belt, the surfaces and atmospheres of the objects there, and what they might be made of, but the question of what to call them never came up. But at night, when we went to little cafés (the closest of which was precisely 1,032 crutch-steps away, which felt to me like the distance from Earth to Sedna) to drink prosecco and watch the World Cup soccer games, everyone wanted to speculate about Pluto and Xena and planets. I tried out my arguments about ten planets and about continents. The scientists balked. They didn’t like the idea that the definition of planet would include no science.
“So you think everything round should be a planet? You think that there should be two hundred planets?” I asked, assuming that that was going to be the obvious response.
“Of course not!” they responded. Wasn’t it obvious that there were only eight planets?
I thought the other astronomers were being naïve. It’s easy to sit inside the scientific bubble and make pronouncements, but they were forgetting how much of an impact this decision was